Home gardening inspiration, plus a boxwood garden and Chinese garden: Missouri Botanical Garden, part 4

Home gardening inspiration, plus a boxwood garden and Chinese garden: Missouri Botanical Garden, part 4

June 27, 2021 Visiting Missouri Botanical Garden (MOBOT) earlier this month for the first time, I expected to breeze through the Center for Home Gardening and get on to more interesting parts of the garden. Instead I found myself poking around this space for close to an hour. I was ...
Chinoiserie enchantment at Chandor Gardens, part 2

Chinoiserie enchantment at Chandor Gardens, part 2

October 31, 2019 Given 3-1/2 acres of cow pasture in North Texas, it turns out you can do quite a lot with it. Continuing with my mid-October visit to Weatherford’s Chandor Gardens (click for part 1 of my visit), here’s more of the romantic English-Chinese garden that portraitist Douglas Chandor ...
Chandor Gardens, née White Shadows, a hidden gem in North Texas, part 1

Chandor Gardens, née White Shadows, a hidden gem in North Texas, part 1

October 29, 2019 White Shadows — the name evokes romance and mystery — seems wholly appropriate for the dappled-shade garden surrounding a pale-gray house in the small Texas town of Weatherford, 30 miles west of Fort Worth. Here, in a series of alternately elegant and rustic garden rooms, you’ll find ...
Lan Su Chinese Garden, a downtown Portland oasis

Lan Su Chinese Garden, a downtown Portland oasis

September 23, 2017 While vacationing in Portland last month, we visited Lan Su Chinese Garden in downtown Portland. It was my third visit, and I find I enjoy it more each time I see it. Chinese gardens have had to grow on me, so different do they seem from the ...
Evening photo shoot at The Huntington Gardens: GWA Pasadena

Evening photo shoot at The Huntington Gardens: GWA Pasadena

October 29, 2015 The Huntington gardens near Los Angeles have, for years, been on my wish list of botanical gardens to visit. So I was thrilled to see an afternoon visit and after-hours photoshoot offered on the itinerary of the Garden Writers Association symposium on September 20. Unfortunately, it was ...
Lan Su Chinese Garden: Portland Garden Bloggers Fling

Lan Su Chinese Garden: Portland Garden Bloggers Fling

July 17, 2014 Austin and Portland, Oregon, are soul-sister cities, sharing a love of “weirdness,” food carts/trucks, huge independent bookstores, and tattoos, as I can attest from my recent visit. Austin and Portland also share a vibrant gardening culture and even the same hardiness zone (8b), although our climates couldn’t ...